Friday, October 28, 2016

1. A McSweeney'spost
titled "10 Signs Your Partner Plans to Name Your Baby Something
Horribly Unconventional" brings back memories of when Mrs. Van
Horn and I were trying to come up with a name for Pumpkin --
but not because of anything like this:

There's a
book by the toilet titled 18th Century Jobs with pages folded
down at Besswarden, Cloistress, Delver, Hayward, and
Yeoman.

Quite to the contrary, we were on the same page,
with her "key chain rule" stipulating that a name should be common
enough to find in a key chain display, and yet not so common as to be
sold out. Regarding our daughter's name, someone approached me on a
subway platform back in Boston to admire the baby. Upon my revealing
the name, she smiled and said, "Wow! I can pronounce it and
spell it!"

I am also reminded by contrast of a couple who
came up with a very long and odd name for their child. A mutual
acquaintance replied, "His
name is my name, too," immediately upon hearing about it for the
first time.

2. From the annals of World War II comes
the story
of how Alan Turing got out of military service:

It
was true. On his application form Turing had encountered the question
"Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place
yourself liable to military law?" He could see no advantage in
answering yes, so he answered no, and the clerk had filed the form
without looking at it.

"So all they could do was to declare
that he was not a member of the Home Guard," remembered Peter
Hilton. "Of course that suited him perfectly. It was quite
characteristic of him. And it was not being clever. It was just taking
this form, taking it at its face value and deciding what was the
optimal strategy if you had to complete a form of this kind. So much
like the man all the way through."

In a way, it makes
sense that it was this easy for a computer scientist to outwit a
robotic bureaucracy.

3. Modern
video games are simulating the footwork (real and imagined) of
world-class soccer players so well that some professionals are
incorporating those moves into their style of
play:

[Arsenal's Alex Iwobi] also had a soft spot for
Aiden McGeady, an altogether less remarkable Irish winger. "He had one
turn that I would go out into the garden and practice," Iwobi
said.

It was the same with Ronaldinho. Iwobi would spend
hours trying to bring to life the tricks his idol could do only in
virtual reality. Mastering them helped him in the cage, and then in
his career.

Only twenty, Iwobi has become a regular
starter this season for my favorite team, and his smooth moves and
creativity have been a joy to watch.

4. ViaIn the
Pipeline comes a good
story about a naturopath who, "once considered herself a doctor,"
but is now "an apostate":

[Britt] Hermes spent three years
practicing naturopathy, a broad-reaching form of alternative medicine
that focuses on "natural" care, including herbal remedies,
acupuncture, and the discredited practice of homeopathy. But unease
about a colleague's ethics led her to look more closely at her
profession -- and what she found alarmed her.

So for the
past two years, Hermes has been waging a scathing fight against
naturopathy on social media, in science blogs, and on her own
website, Naturopathic Diaries,
which just won a "best blog of the year" award from a scientific
skepticism magazine in the United Kingdom. She has not pulled
punches. [format edits, links in article removed, link to blog
added]

Although I oppose all licensing laws on principle,
I support Hermes's efforts: So long as there are licensing
laws, they should based as much as possible on sound
science.

On a more positive note, it is encouraging to see
someone make such a dramatic change from superstition to reason.